What could be more bizarre than an early morning TV discussion program and phone-in about where the capital of the country is located? Except, that is, the present government policy, inherited from 50 years of KMT misrule, of placing it in another country.
What prompts these musings is Premier Yu Shyi-kun's response on Friday to DPP Legislator Cho Jung-tai (
Of course, Chen is unlikely to do any of this, and we can't help but wonder whether this doesn't in itself focus on a fundamental oversight of Chen's government, which is that so much time has been spent on futile political battles when so much could have been done administratively to change Taiwan's cultural agenda. A complete housecleaning of the education curriculum to get rid of reunificationist fantasy would be a start. Why, as Trong Chai (
This problem with the high-school curriculum is simply indicative of a wider failing of the DPP's vision, namely its lack of a revolutionary ideology. We do not mean of course that the DPP should have adopted some bizarre political agenda such as Maoism. What we do mean is that it needed to have a more dynamic vision of what change outside the merely political was necessary in Taiwan. A state contains more than political institutions. One of the strongest parts of any society are the social institutions that work to propagate the ideology of the ruling class -- what Louis Althusser has called "ideological state apparatuses," which include the media, educational, cultural and religious institutions. The KMT -- which, incidentally, does, or did, have a revolutionary background and as a result understood the importance of these things -- has monopolized these apparatuses for half a century to disseminate the colonial KMT's version of Taiwan's history and culture. And to a great extent it, along with its "blue camp" fellow travellers, still does.
The problem here is that this means that the DPP is always having to argue its cause in a debate framed by the assumptions of its enemies, since these are the assumptions of Taiwan in general. In not wanting to rock the boat, perhaps, because of its origins, not understanding how the boat needed to be rocked, the DPP has left far too much of this status quo in place.
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